It appears that things aren’t going very well for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his hopes for reelection. A new poll shows him trailing two possible challengers by wide margins.

An Early & Often Poll for Chicago Sun Times found both Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle with big leads over Emanuel. If the election was held today Lewis would beat him 45 percent to 36 percen while Preckwinkle would crush Emanuel 55 percent to just 31 percent.

Karen Lewis has been seriously considering a possible run and this poll might be the added incentive to get her officially in. We can likely expect Lewis to make a final decision by August.

It is important to remember that this is just one poll and the election won’t take place until February 2015. A lot could change between now and then, but it is more evidence that Emanuel is having really problems.

A democratic state senator once told me, wrt to electronic voting machines, that only about 2 1/2% can be wiggled, that is to say ~ stolen. Don’t know if that is true… but I’m certainly hoping Rahm gets his pink slip.

If Republicans were smart (a big if), they’d try and take this seat. Do a Giuliani, so to speak. Chicago hasn’t had a Republican mayor since the 1930′s. It could happen.

I was always surprised when Rahm ran. He’s a DC Dem. Chicago has a ton of blue collar and poor people, and Rahm can’t stand being around “those types of people” (as he might put it). He’d rather be hobnobbing with lobbyists in DC. Being Mayor is hard work.

Emanuel got in due to his connections with the president. Star power. If he thinks the ‘machine’ will back him, it ain’t gonna happen. The secret to the machine isn’t that it’s comprised of big shots but of ordinary people. I went to city hall during the original Mayor Daley’s time and was surprised to see that the employees were not the hip in-crowd with connections but people who would probably not have jobs were it not for the mayor. When he said: “Get out the vote” they got out the vote. That was the so-called machine.

When Dan Walker first ran for governor of Illinois he had an enormous grass roots volunteer organization of idealistic followers. I was one of them. Thousands of us went door to door, did the legwork, and he got elected. Then it became evident that he was just another sleazy politician. Next time he ran for office nobody on the ground was there for him and he lost.

No way will Emanuel have an organization of any size backing him. What has he done for the little guy, the union worker, and so on? Nothing. I doubt that many of his BMW driving Izod wearing minions will soil their shoes in the hoods. He should be impeached. It would serve his neocon ass right.

Good news….I really loathe the man. He’s a total opportunist and one of the most cynical officials in the country. He cares nothing for working people, and has done everything in his power to break the teacher’s unions there in Chicago.

Normally the Mayor of Chicago beats everyone in the polls. We need a break down of this poll by race and by neighborhood if Rahm can’t win the Irish and Polish in the polls then the question is will the Daley Machine and Polish political machine feel like working hard for Rahm.
Given Rahm’s past on immigration I would not expect a strong turnout from Hispanics after all the Machine always wins.
Given the school closings in African American neighborhoods which force kids to walk through new neighborhoods they might get shot at I don’t think Rahm can count on their vote.

The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health-care overhaul.
“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants. He warned them not to alienate lawmakers whose votes would be needed on health care and other top legislative items

From 2011 an article by Ben Joravsky in which he contrasts the Chicago Public Library system which Mayor Emanuel was then in the process of gutting financially, with the one in the mayor’s nearby hometown of Wilmette.

The assault on libraries in Mayor Emanuel’s Chicago has joined with the one on public schools, taking many forms from the elimination of the libraries themselves to the reassigning of teacher-librarians to other duties.

One of the schools discussed, Walter Payton College Prep whose librarian is presently teaching Spanish, is a magnet school that has (hopefully not “had”) been building a reputation for quality that one might have expected to become a model to be maintained by the city. For comparison, the public school that Wilmette kids attend. The school’s website has a library page.

I don’t blame you for being cynical, Jane. After all, when Rahm was granted the kingdom of Chicago by Obama, the Republicans didn’t even bother to put up a candidate against him. I’d have gladly voted for the republican if they had. Just more evidence that both parties are in on it against the rest of us, to my mind.

I happened to be a respondent in some recent polling and I used the opportunity to express my vehement opposition to him and I know I’m far from alone in feeling that way. I think there’s a reasonable chance he could lose the Democratic primary.